Older Americans have long been uncomfortable talking about class, but today, young Americans are wildly interested in reading about it.

Many of the most popular young adult novels right now–including “Divergent,” “The Hunger Games,” and “Red Rising“–portray futuristic dystopias in which society has been divided by totalitarian rulers into sharply defined castes, factions and districts. Near the beginning of the film adaptation of “Divergent,” which opened last night, one character offers a kind of social status manifesto: “The future belongs to those who know where they belong.”

According to Rentrak, “Divergent” pulled in an estimated $4.9 million during special Thursday night showings yesterday.

Science fiction writers–including such authors as Ursula K. Le Guin and China Miéville–have long used stories set in the future to explore ideas about social status.

H.G. Wells’s 1895 novel “The Time Machine” imagined journeying to A.D. 802,701 to find that the human race had evolved into two species–the beautiful, surface-dwelling Eloi and the ape-like, underground-dwelling Morlocks. The time traveler concludes that “it seemed as clear as daylight to me that the gradual widening of the present merely temporary and social difference between Capitalist and the Labourer, was the key to the whole position.”

Books about the future are really about the present. Nobody really believes the plot of “Divergent” will come to pass, and that society will split into fancifully named factions like Dauntless, Candor and Abnegation. But the colorful storyline resonates with readers because they see seeds of similar situations now.

In recent months, global leaders ranging from President Barack Obama to Pope Francis have sought to turn the world’s attention to the issue of wealth disparity. Earlier this year, The International Monetary Fund released a report that argued that wealth inequality in the U.S. and other advanced economies had returned to levels not seen since before the Great Depression, and that it was fueling political instability and possibly serving as a barrier to global economic growth.

Younger readers, picking up on the anxieties of their elders and perhaps the tenor of the times, are seeking out books that transform Occupy Wall Street-type concerns into dramatic narratives. In turn, these dystopian science fiction novels are surpercharging such issues with science fiction themes.

“Red Rising,” a bestselling novel released last month, transports the class struggle to Mars, where mankind has been divided into color-coded factions, from the lower-class Reds to the ruling Golds. At the start of the book, a Gold caste member declares “All men are not created equal…The weak have deceived you. They would say the meek should inherit the Earth. That the strong should nurture the gentle. This is the Noble Lie of Demokracy.”

“The Time Machine,” Yvette Mimieux (left), 1960.

Everett Collection

Dystopian books can encourage cultural procrastination. By setting the stories in the future, readers feel less threatened by the problems presented in the books, and perhaps less driven to take action in their own time. Most of the buzz on Twitter about the “Divergent” movie is about its sexy young stars Shailene Woodley and Theo James and not the unsexy old topic of the factionalization of society.

“Divergent” and other such books are almost completely unconcerned with issues beyond social status. In the future they present, gender differences have been pretty much swept away, except for the fun parts, which allow for tattoo revealing love scenes.

And, at least according to these books, nobody cares much about race in the future, in part because almost every group, black, white and other, is utterly impoverished. “Decades ago, our ancestors realized that it is not political ideology, religious belief, race or nationalism that is to blame for a warring world,” one character explains in “Divergent.”

In July 2012, Roth had this note posted to her Tumblr: “The truth is, I often wish that I had chosen to have a darker-skinned main character in the books (so, either Tobias or Tris), but I wasn’t aware of my own racial ‘default setting’ when I wrote Divergent, or of the severe lack of diversity in YA main characters. I have since become aware and I intend to change things up in the future.”

The class struggles in some teen dystopian novels sometimes seem to hark back more to high school class struggles than anything to be found in the writings of Marx and Engels.

For decades, teen books and movies have fed off the conceit that high schools are hierarchical houses of horror, with jocks and cool kids on top, wimps and nerds on the bottom, and ordinary kids of various types muddling around the middle. In the new wave of teen dystopian fiction, high school age heroes face cliques with a sci-fi spin.

In “Red Rising,” Darrow, a teenage lower-caste Red, remakes his life to ascend to power among the ruling Golds. In“The Hunger Games,” Katniss “Kat” Everdeen, a poor teen from an oppressed district, becomes a symbol of the struggle to overthrow the wealthy, powerful Capitol. And in “Divergent,” 16-year-old Beatrice “Tris” Prior discovers that she doesn’t fit into any of the factions that have been set up by the rulers of her society, and she moves to subvert their dominance. All three heroes are faced with life-changing exams, aptitude tests, and contests along the way.

In these books, classroom struggles segue to a class struggle that never ends.

We’ve seen the future and it looks a lot like high school.

C.J. Farley, a senior editor at the Wall Street Journal, is the author of the new children’s fantasy novel “Game World.” Follow him on Twitter @cjfarley

About Speakeasy

Speakeasy is a blog covering media, entertainment, celebrity and the arts. The publication is produced by Barbara Chai and Jonathan Welsh with contributions from the Wall Street Journal staff and others. Write to us at speakeasy@wsj.com or follow us on Twitter at @WSJSpeakeasy or individually @barbarachai.